Deadly Indonesian Tsunami was Triggered by Landslide, Study Suggests

Until recently, scientists were puzzled why an earthquake of only 7.5 magnitude caused a devastating tsunami that killed over 2,000 people on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia in September of 2018. The earthquake didn’t even trigger the tsunami early warning system as normally a tsunami of the size (wave height up to 11m or 36 ft) would require an 8.4 or higher magnitude earthquake. A new study published in the journal Pure and Applied Geophysics has found that the cause of the tsunami was actually a marine landslide in Palu Bay on the west coast of Sulawesi. A combination of computer modeling and observation of the actual sea level data from the event was used to reach their conclusion. They observed a wave period that was very short, consistent with the 3 to 4 minutes expected based on the modeling of a marine landslide compared to the 15 to 60 minute periods for an earthquake-induced tsunami.

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Some juicy geoengineering news items in this post. I could turn just about all of them into a separate blog post if I had time, maybe I still will for some of them. Don’t miss this list! All of the links are active when you view it on the site. If you’re looking at this in your RSS feed reader or on your daily email, you won’t see the actual links, sorry.

Geo-Engineering Reconnaissance of the February 27, 2010 Maule, Chile Earthquake, Version 1: April 15, 2010 – Geoengineer.org Press Center The GEER is an NSF-funded group that was created to collect perishable data in the wake of extreme events (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, landslides, or floods) in the interests of learning from the events to advance the state of geoengineering practice. This report on the earthquake was produced by over 40 lead authors and contributing authors from universities and consulting companies around the world.

Last Sunday, April 25, 2010 a major landslide covered a 300-m plus stretch of Taiwan’s National Freeway No. 3, killing at least 4 people and burying three cars and destroying a bridge. The estimated volume […]